OUTLOOK at 18: Very Dim

OUTLOOK magazine has just celebrated its 18th birthday with an issue that is loony even by its own weird standards.

The “Lead Essay” by Pratap Bhanu Mehta is a loosely linked collection of slack-jawed observations about magazine journalism. Samples:

• “Writing, writing, writing. The only mantra a magazine has to recite and keep reciting over and over. But how this mantra works is, of course, a more complicated question.”

• “The number of words a story requires depends on what a well-told story can bear. Story-writing is not a number crunching exercise.” 

• “Multiple partialities is (sic) not the same thing as objectivity. In a democracy or in any story, it is usually a good idea to make sure all issues and points of view have been considered. But a mere presentation of different points of view is not objectivity. In an age where (sic) everyone’s opinion is a little too readily available, it is not clear that reproducing multiple opinions makes the magazine interesting. The Indian media seems (sic) to think its commitment to objectivity is over simply because it got opposing sides to air their views. Credible mediation requires the ability to sift through opinion.”

The next article is a stupefying piece by British propagandist John Keay, headlined “Leadenhall Street Irregulars.” The subtitle is “1818: The Company licks its chops, counts its acres; Evangelists, in a righteous fury, outvoice a few sane Englishmen.” (The Deal, an oil on canvas painting of Clive and the traitor Mir Jafar at Pilashi, serves as illustration.) 

For those who are not aficionados of British propaganda, let me introduce Keay. He is one of the very few “historians” still wedded to the idea of an Aryan invasion of India.  (Either that, or he is an MI6 stand-in extending the shelf-life of outdated but still serviceable propaganda.)

To defend the idea of the Aryan invasion, Keay in his History of India (a 2000 “Harper Perennial”), asserted that the Ramayana was composed after the Mahabharata instead of several millennia before it. He even dismissed as “interpolation” the “condensed version of the [Ramayana] story told in the Mahabharata.” It had to be, he argued, because “Rama’s capital of Ayodhya lay astride the Uttarapatha and five hundred kilometers east of the Kuru/Pandavas’ Hastinapura,” offering “precious evidence of the continuing spread of Aryanization during the first millennium B.C.” (He seems to be ignorant of both works, for no such deduction can be made: the Mahabharata also shows familiarity with the entire territory of India.)

Keay's article is stupefying because it appears in 2013, in what is ostensibly an Indian magazine.

I wonder if the people responsible for the editorial content of OUTLOOK – Krishna Prasad, Editor-in-Chief, Satish Padmanabhan who edited this issue, and Editorial Chairman Vinod Mehta – realized the extent to which Keay is repeating old imperial propaganda. Or do they agree that the British acquired their Empire “in a fit of absence of mind,” and that 1818 marked the beginning of “Pax Britannica?”

The British advanced those claims to hide their murderous rapacity.

If there was a British peace after 1818, it was that of the crematorium. The great slaughter of the Sikhs that brought the Punjab under the British was still 40 years in the future. A decade after that, the uprising of 1857 gave way to a “pacification” that killed some ten million civilians. That was followed by the unprecedented bloodbath of Hindu-Muslim “riots” the British engineered to Partition India. In leaving, they started up the conflict in Kashmir and created the ISI in Pakistan to carry on killing. And from beginning to end, British rule was marked by massive man-made famines that killed over 100 million people. Pax Britannica indeed!

After Keay’s article comes one by a teacher of history at Delhi University, Anirudh Deshpande, also focused on 1818! It is headlined “Pride, Flash, Glory and Dust” and examines the proposition that the Maratha power “went down in a blaze of futile fury, court intrigue and dangerous folly.” (If the year 1818 had some mystical appeal to the powers that be at OUTLOOK, they might have focused more interestingly on the birth of Karl Marx or the founding of The Friend of India in Serampore, in which The Statesman of Calcutta is rooted.)

The rest of the issue is a wild mélange ranging from interviews with a variety of 18-year olds to articles on “a drive down NH-18,” the place with the 180018 Pin code, notes on several couples who married at 18, and a “new parent-child jam band” showing that 18 “ain’t so angsty.”

There is a shaggy dog discussion by a panel headlined “We can’t wait for anything anymore.” Anjolie Ela Menon has too short a piece on changes in Indian art over the last two decades; 18 authors tell of themselves at 18; Canadian pop star Bryan Adams talks to an interviewer about his middling 1996 hit “18 till I die.” There are also several pages of random facts connected to 18, pix of various celebrities at 18, and bits about OUTLOOK staff.

The vacuity of the issue is stunning if we consider that the last 18 years have seen the following momentous milestones:

• The Indian population rose past a billion
• We became a nuclear-weapons State 
• Mobile telephone networks encompassed us in unprecedented connectivity 
• Archeologists found structures off the Gujarat coast that could date back 9500 years 
• China and India led the emergence of developing countries as the driving force of the world economy after the 2008 financial meltdown plunged the major developed countries into recession.
• The BJP gained and lost power in Delhi. The Communists lost power in Kerala and West Bengal and the National Election Commission ruled that the Party is no longer a national entity.
• Communal violence rose to a new high afterthe demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the post-Godhra bloodletting in Gujarat. 
• Terrorism rose to new heights with Mumbai a primary target. 
• K. R. Narayanan and Prathiba Patel became the country’s first dalit and woman Presidents. 
• Pakistani squatters in Kargil were driven out. 
• “Super cyclones” hit Andhra and Orissa, one taking a toll of some 2000 lives and the other killing about 10,000.
• India and the United States became strategic partners and Washington executed a “pivot to Asia” as it responded to the new calculus of global power. President Jiang Zemin became the first Chinese Head of State to visit India. 

There’s only one good thing I can say about OUTLOOK at 18. There’s nothing in it by either Arundhati Roy or Suhel Seth.

UN Day #68: What Have We Learned?

Today is United Nations Day, commemorating the 68th anniversary of the coming into force of the organization's founding Charter.

It is an occasion to reflect on what we have learned, not just from the experience of the last two generations, but from a process that began with the creation of such small technical agencies as the International Telegraphic Union (1865), the International Meteorological Organization (1873) and the Universal Postal Union (1874).

They were created to meet the need for international cooperation imposed by the growing use of standardized transport and communications technologies.

International use of the telegraph obviously needed such cooperation; so did the sharing of meteorological information important for shipping and agriculture. The UPU became necessary because the booming volume of mail carried by the railways and steamships made it impossible to continue the old system of weighing and paying for mailbags at each international border; it put in place a multilateral payments system.

Ironically, at the same time as international cooperation was making a quantum jump, the use of industrial technologies led to much higher levels of conflict. Violent competition for the raw materials and markets essential for factory-scale production involved a succession of colonial wars, and they cascaded into the First World War (1915-1919).

In the wake of that "war to end all wars," the major Powers set up the League of Nations, but undermined it comprehensively with a range of aggressions and economic manipulations.

Their no-holds barred economic competition created such instability in world markets that trade went into a decline, and then into a free fall, setting off the Great Depression of the 1930s.   

What happened was that as trade declined, so did manufacturing, and millions of people lost their jobs. As their consumption of goods and services dropped, manufacturing took another hit, and more factories closed, swelling still more the ranks of the unemployed.   

 The League tried to get governments to cooperate in reviving the world economy, but had no success. Governments were too locked into their own defensive-aggressive postures.

The acute misery of millions of Europeans allowed the rise of fascist demagogues like Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. Britain and France initially supported their rise in the expectation that fascism would counter Communism, which had taken over Russia during WW-I.

The fascists did destroy or weaken the Communist movements in Western Europe, but instead of then confronting the Soviet Union as Britain and France expected, they turned on weaker countries; that set off World War II (1939-1945)

The First World War had killed an estimated 10 million people; the Second took a toll so large it has been impossible to agree on a precise number; various estimates put it between 50 and 70 million.

As the war wound to a close, the United States initiated talks on a successor organization.

President Franklin Roosevelt dubbed his brainchild the "United Nations," but by the time its Charter was signed in San Francisco, he was dead and the nuclear weapons that ended WW-II had destroyed the concept of "collective security" enshrined in the UN Security Council.

The subsequent outbreak of the Cold War and the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons effectively stalemated the Security Council for the next 4+ decades.

Another tectonic shift was the Churchill-Ismay coup against American constitutional government in March 1946: it brought into power a military-industrial clique in Washington that pursued a policy of endemic war over the next six decades.

These developments turned the UN into a spare wheel, called into service whenever the imperial Powers needed it, otherwise left to languish in ever-increasing inertia and corruption.

However, those decades also saw the rise of developing countries in the face of tremendous odds, and beginning in the early 1970s, the pursuit of a "New International Economic Order" through intensified cooperation among themselves. Developing countries are now the most dynamic portion of the world economy, and in another decade just three of them, China, India and Brazil, will have more of world GDP than all of Western Europe and the United States.

All these trends, as well as some new ones, are at work in the UN of 2013.

The new ones include the end of American dependence on Middle Eastern oil that has allowed Washington to stop supporting the feudal regimes in that region and a weakening of the unconstitutional power nexus the British had established in Washington.  

The impact of all this on the UN will be profound, but no one can predict the direction of change.

What, for instance, are we to make of Saudi Arabia's refusal to take the Security Council seat it had lobbied for and won?

There is much speculation about Riyadh's U-turn; I suspect it was the realization that US support for its entry into the Council did not mean closer ties but just the opposite.

With the US and Russia closing ranks on Syria and Washington making overtures to Tehran -- Saudi Arabia's primary rival in its own region -- it must have become obvious to Riyadh that Council membership would only bring an uncomfortable level of international accountability.

However the Saudi-Security Council relationship develops, there is little doubt that the international situation is in a rarely seen danger zone, with mutual trust at a low ebb among traditional allies, especially Europe and the United States.

Exactly how dangerous the situation is, we can only guess.

According to Helen Caldicott, the US Army fired the General in charge of its nuclear missiles on a matter of "trust," just as Washington was in the final phase of its debt limit negotiations. That suggests a chilling new implication for the phrase "nuclear option." Did the British bid to destroy the US$ as the world's reserve currency, elicit a starker threat?

Even if nothing like that happened, there are other near doomsday scenarios. There are the continuing uncertainties of the Eurozone and China, the threats to the Indian elections of 2014, and the possibilities for mayhem in Arab-Iran-Israel relations. If any of those situations gets out of hand, it could mushroom into a global disaster. 

What can we say about the UN in such a world scenario?

Not much, but it is grim.

If the power struggle between Britain's hidden Empire and its victims ends up with cataclysmic scenarios, the future of internationalism will depend on who is still standing after the rubble has stopped bouncing.  

If there is no great crisis and the ghost of Empire is laid at last to rest, the UN will have to be radically reinvented for an electronically networked world.

Either way, we're in a period of fateful decision.

Britain & Hinduism 8: Breaking Bad

In 1972, a British national of Pakistani origin, Agha Hasan Abedi, founded what he called a “Third World bank” in London. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) became a runaway success, expanding from 19 to 108 branches in three years and its assets jumping from $200 million to $1.6 billion. In less than two decades, it had $23 billion in assets and was operating in 73 countries, with offshoots in Luxembourg and Grand Cayman. It became the first foreign bank to open an office in China.

Through its Third World Foundation BCCI handed out awards to luminaries like Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (with Indira Gandhi making the presentation). As the bank’s senior staff hobnobbed with presidents and prime ministers and the governments of many developing countries gave it their official business, tens of thousands of small depositors in developing countries trusted it with their life savings.

What only a few people knew was that BCCI also held the accounts of Abu Nidal the terrorist, members of the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia, and Lieutenant-General Fazle Haq, the governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, who had set up hundreds of heroin processing plants close to the Afghan border and trucked their output to Karachi in military vehicles.

Britain and Hinduism 2: Murder as Policy

Over the centuries religion has been a standard tool of the British imperial elite. In manipulating victim populations ranging from Northern Ireland to the Middle East and India, their modus operandi has been simple: create a sense of grievance or entitlement in a religious group and use the resulting conflicts to serve British interests.

This worked well with Christian and Muslim populations with their well-established collective sense of their faith, but in India the technique came up short because our group identities compound religion with culture, caste, language and province. The extremist proxies the British promoted – the Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Hindu Mahasabha under Vinayak Damodar Savarkar – had very limited impact until the colonial regime introduced a historically unprecedented element: communal violence.

They did so first with the “Maplah (Muslim) Rebellion” in Kerala immediately in the wake of Gandhi’s first nation-wide Satyagraha in 1920. It succeeded in destroying the Hindu-Muslim amity created by the Khilafat Movement but there was no permanent communal split nationally.

The next stage came in the run-up to the 1937 elections, when “Hindus” suddenly began to make a series of unprovoked and inexplicable attacks on Muslims. The Muslim League blamed the Congress for the attacks in a series of written reports that made no mention of the Hindu Mahasabha (newly under Savarkar). The reports described the assaults with Dickensian bathos: the victims were invariably pious people at prayer or celebrating some happy holiday; the attackers came to their bloody business shouting “Gandhi ki jai!” Suspicion that it was all a British command performance was widespread, and the Viceroy (Linlithgow) only reinforced that with a series of unctuous speeches expressing his “deep conviction that upon [Hindu-Muslim] unity depend the position and prestige of India before the nations, and her capacity to take her due place in the world.”

The violence was meant to scare Muslims into supporting the League but it did not work. Within their reserved vote banks and in the general electorate, Muslims voted overwhelmingly for other parties. The North-West Frontier Province, with a population over 90 per cent Muslim, voted solidly for a close ally of the Congress, the Redshirt Party led by the great Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The Punjab, with a Muslim majority of about 53 per cent, elected the Unionist Party led by Sikander Hyat Khan who had broad Hindu and Sikh support. In Bengal, which also had a thin Muslim majority, a regional party won a plurality with support from all communities. Jinnah could not gain control even of his own native province, Muslim-majority Sind; the local leader, Khan Bahadur Allah Bux, opted to ally himself with the Congress.

Both Hyat Khan and Allah Bux rejected the notion that Hindus and Muslims were different “nations” and they would have been formidable obstacles to Partition. But neither lived to oppose it: Hyat Khan died suddenly of an alleged “heart attack” at the age of 50 and Allah Bux was assassinated. 

Mahatma Gandhi, the most effective foe of British rule, had become the target of deadly assault much earlier. The first attempt on his life was on 25 June 1934, when an unknown assailant threw a bomb at a car in which he was supposed to be travelling. As Tushar Gandhi (the Mahatma’s great-grandson), noted in his 2007 book Let’s Kill Gandhi! the bomb injured several policemen but “surprisingly, there [was] no record of any investigations or arrests.” As he also underlined, the attack took place in Pune, the base of operations for the gang that tried repeatedly to kill Gandhi and finally succeeded on 30 January 1948.

A second attempt on Gandhi’s life was in July 1944 at the small resort of Panchgani near Pune where he was recuperating from the near death experience of his final imprisonment. The assailant, Nathuram Godse, rushed at him with a dagger but was stopped and disarmed. Gandhi invited him to stay and talk but Godse stalked off; no police action followed. In September the same year, Godse tried again, joining a group at the entrance to Sevagram Ashram armed with a dagger; the police confiscated the weapon but once again, failed to take any action.

These incidents occurred well before the massive atrocities at the time of Partition that supposedly enraged Godse into killing Gandhi in 1948. They make clear that Godse's statement prior to his execution expressing outrage at the afflictions of of the Hindu community was pure propaganda. The available facts, especially the scandalous police inaction that extended from 1934 to 1948, point firmly to a long-standing conspiracy supported by the British and centred on Savarkar, Godse and Narayan Apte.

Apte has been generally viewed as little more than Godse's sidekick but he was in fact a key figure. A womanizing part-time recruiter for the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF), he declined a coveted permanent commission at the height of the Great Depression to continue his marginal existence as Savarkar’s henchman. The only believable explanation for that decision is that he was already employed full-time as an operative of British Intelligence.

A third plotter, Madanlal Pahwa, was a former radio operator in the Navy and probably kept Savarkar in touch with his British controllers. Another factor indicating a wider conspiracy to murder Gandhi is the mystery surrounding the provenance of the murder weapon. It was initially reported stolen from the armory at Nasik; later accounts said it was an almost brand new Beretta automatic brought to India from Italy by a former Army officer.

The 1944 attempts on Gandhi’s life followed his providential escape from death in custody, at a time when British leaders wanted him dead. Winston Churchill responded to news of his 21-day fast in 1943  by sending a “most secret encrypted message” to the Viceroy (Linlithgow) urging him against “any show of leniency.” Linlithgow assured the Prime Minister he would “feel no compunction” in letting Gandhi die. A later cable contained Churchill’s cold query why Gandhi was not dead yet. His survival probably had something to do with the interest Franklin Roosevelt took in the matter; at one point he had the State Department summon the British Ambassador in Washington and tell him flatly “Gandhi must not die in prison.”  

Gandhi fasted in prison to protest the "man-made famine" in Bengal with which the colonial regime responded to the Quit India movement. That punitive intent is clear in the fact that as some 3 million people starved to death, Churchill turned down requests to divert any of the numerous supply ships passing within hours of Calcutta carrying food from New Zealand to Britain. British diplomats also declined a Canadian offer of free grain.

Another object of Gandhi's protest was the brutal repression of the leaderless Quit India Movement. The colonial police and Army routinely beat, machine-gunned and bombed nonviolent demonstrators; torture and custodial death were common. Sushila Nayar's diary recorded that Indian sources within the government estimated the civilian death toll at some 50,000; she noted that the actual toll was higher.

Not all murders the regime committed were open and violent. There were also many quiet deaths  supposedly from natural causes. Three of Gandhi’s closest aides were eliminated in that manner. His nephew Maganlal, who founded and ran Sabarmati Ashram, the person the Mahatma considered his political “heir,” died inexplicably in 1928; that was when consultations were beginning for the declaration of Purna Swaraj the next year.

The next to go was the formidable business magnate Jamanlal Bajaj, who founded Sevagram Ashram in Wardha, where Gandhi moved in 1930. He dropped dead of a supposed brain haemorrhage in February 1942, as Congress was gearing up for what became the Quit India movement. It was reported to be a "staggering loss" to Gandhi, the most serious blow he had suffered since Maganlal's death.

Less than six months later, Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s private secretary, the only person who knew all of the Mahatma’s vast network of contacts and correspondents, dropped dead in prison. The three deaths not only affected Gandhi’s capacity for action at crucial times, they eliminated those most capable of carrying on his legacy.

Gandhi did not consider the deaths of his primary aides to be natural. On 2 March 1944 Sushila Nayar’s diary noted that he told her: “One after the other, you may all be taken away and I may be left alone. That will be a pathetic state.”

The death of his wife in prison also weighed heavily on Gandhi. In a rare personal complaint, he wrote to Viceroy (Wavell) disputing the regime’s public claim that Kasturba had been provided the best medical care and pointing out the many “pinpricks” the old couple had endured in prison. British “historians” have continued to repeat the canard that Kasturba’s death resulted from Gandhi’s refusal to permit the use of penicillin. Nayar’s diary makes clear that she (as the doctor in attendance), had asked the prison authorities for penicillin but was told it was unavailable.

All the foregoing pales in the light of the mass murders the British engineered in the final two years of their control of India. To understand why they did that we have to appreciate the global context.

World War II had pauperized Britain. Its main creditor, the United States, was pressing hard for an end to its Empire. Churchill’s hopes that Britain would have room to manoeuver by using the Soviet Union to counterbalance American power came to an abrupt end in 1945 when the United States became the world’s only nuclear Power. Without hope of holding India in the face of its massive nationalist mobilization and increasingly mutinous army. British strategists headed by Churchill decided that India had to be split.

David Monteath, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Foreign Office, summed up their rationale in a note for the file. “If India falls apart we may, I suppose, expect the Muslims to try and enlist British support by offering us all sorts of military and political facilities, to commit ourselves to what would be in effect the defence of one Indian state against another.”

To make India “fall apart” became the British objective from mid-1946, and the first step towards that goal was the "Great Calcutta Killing" initiated by the Muslim League on its “Direct Action Day,” 16 August. Jinnah was then secretly getting political advice from Churchill, who had arranged for letters to be routed through his private secretary, Miss E.A. Gilliat, at 6 Westminster Gardens in London.
The idea of using mass murder for political gain probably originated in that correspondence, for Jinnah was too fastidiously lawyerly to have come up with such an egregiously criminal plan on his own.

Whatever the origin of the plan, there is no doubt that the British actively facilitated the killings. The police did nothing as a crowd of Muslim League "hooligans" (as The Statesman described them), dispersed after Friday prayers on the Maidan and went on a spree of murder and arson, targeting Hindus and Sikhs. The Army, which had withdrawn all its outposts in the city the previous day, remained firmly ensconced in Fort William as thousands of people were beaten, hacked and burned to death over the next 72 hours. Retaliatory killings of Muslims did not get under way in the city until, on the third day of murder and arson, a group of Marwari businessmen assembled a band of hardened criminals and announced a bounty. Whether they did so under instructions from the British is a question that needs to be asked because without retaliation their whole project would have stalled.

The events in Calcutta set off a murderous rampage in the Muslim-majority area of Noakhali now in Bangladesh, and that led to mayhem in Bihar, and across North India. Descriptions of this process have commonly used the phrase “communal madness,” as if it were a natural contagion; but that distorts what actually happened. Those who witnessed the 1946-1947 riots up close have invariably reported that the killings were organized, and that goondas, criminals without any tint of faith, were always in the forefront of action.

Peace activist Muriel Smith who ran a relief centre at Noakhali made an additional important point when she wrote: “Perhaps the only thing that can be quite positively asserted about this orgy of arson and violence is that it was not a spontaneous uprising of the villagers. However many goondas may live in Bengal, they are incapable of organizing this campaign on their own initiative. Houses have been sprayed with petrol and burnt. Who supplied this rationed fuel? … Who supplied the weapons? The goondas seem to think that they really are the rulers of this beautiful area of Bengal. One sees no sign of fear [or] anxiety as to future punishment ….” Only the colonial authorities could have offered them impunity.

The tale of Partition has been told many times, but no historian has tried as yet to identify the Indians who helped organize the events that led to the murder of a million of their compatriots and rendered 14 million homeless in their own ancient lands. It is important to do that if only to see what role they have continued to play in the post-colonial evolution of Indian politics.

It is also necessary to bring into post-colonial perspective the evolution of the poisonous concept of "Hindutva" the British injected into Indian politics to dismember the country. That will be the focus of Part 3 of this essay.

The Real "Bond Girls"

Malala Yousafzai struggling to recover from a Taliban assassin’s bullets is the latest real life “Bond Girl.”

She is one of the many millions of women and children who have been victims of those “licensed to kill” for Britain.

The linkage is direct. The Taliban was created by Pakistan’s ISI, which was established by British Military Intelligence in 1948 and has been its proxy ever since.

Ian Fleming, who invented the fictional serial killer James Bond, was a psychological warfare expert of British Military Intelligence.

Fleming tarted up murder with sex and fancy gadgetry and conjured up a series of bizarre villains, but underpinning the fiction was the grim reality of officially sanctioned murder of anyone who stood in the way of British “interests.”

The Taliban proxies of MI6 protect the $60 billion British interest in the drug trade out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. To keep that trade going it is necessary to keep the region as the badlands of Empire; Malala had to go. Similarly, protecting the diamond monopoly of DeBeers from post Cold War Russian and Arab mafias required a reign of terror in African producing countries; in Sierra Leone the job was taken in hand by former British special ops soldier Foday Sankoh, who persuaded locals not to deal with outsiders by cutting off hands, legs, ears and noses of thousands of people, including six month old babies.

During the heyday of the British Empire, London’s “interests” required the elimination of entire peoples. In such situations imperial agents killed without a qualm. In Tasmania, British settlers hunted the local people like animals until they were extinct. Winston Churchill even justified such policy to a parliamentary committee on Palestine, saying he did not “feel sorry” for the American Indian or the Australian aborigine because they were replaced by a “superior” race.

In colonial India, the killing was also on genocidal scale. At a conservative estimate, the British killed about 100 million Indians from the time they took control of Bengal (1757) to the imperial sunset turned ruddy by the deaths of over a million people in the assiduously engineered Partition "riots" of 1947.

There was also much targeted killing, the kind 007 is “licensed” to execute. The string of prominent Indians who died sudden and often premature deaths stretches from Raja Rammohun Roy, who was almost certainly poisoned, to Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi.

Gideon Polyna, an Australian academic who has made a specialty of counting up the cost in human lives of the British Empire, estimates that from 1950 to 2005 the "excess deaths" in the British Commonwealth numbered a staggering 700 million. Included in that number were the 100,000 or so Mau Mau rebels killed in Kenya, many by the most gruesome torture. (In July three survivors of that period learned that their effort to sue the British government would be allowed to go forward.)

It is amazing that the editors of Indian “elite” media do not see the dark reality behind the meretricious glamour of James Bond. It is one thing for Judi Dench, the porky British actress who has the role of “M,” the head of MI6, to burble about how “endearing” she finds the character of Bond; for Indian reporters to evince similar sentiments is like a Jew being starry-eyed over Adolf Eichmann or Josef Mengele.